New Delhi: When the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) filed a closure report on December 17, 2014 clearing former coal secretary H.C. Gupta of any wrongdoing in the Bander coal block allocation, the investigating agency had concluded, on the basis of its own enquiry, that there was insufficient evidence against him. The trial court disagreed. Invoking section 319 of the CrPC, it summoned Gupta as a co-accused during trial, a power that allows judges to arraign persons against whom evidence emerges in the course of proceedings.On Friday (March 27), after an 11-year trial, special judge Sunena Sharma acquitted Gupta with a formulation rarely seen in criminal judgments: “this court owes a duty to mention that H.C. Gupta … has been honourably acquitted for lack of any evidence for the alleged charges framed against him”.Gupta’s position across the coal block prosecutions is complex. He has been convicted in several other coal cases, including those involving JLD Yavatmal Energy, Kamal Sponge Steel and Power, and Vini Iron and Steel Udyog, with appeals pending before the Delhi high court. He was discharged in the Mednirai coal block case in April 2025 and acquitted in the Mahugarhi case in June 2025.The Bander acquittal, with its pointed “honourably acquitted” language, thus adds another layer to a legal trajectory that has produced starkly divergent outcomes across different cases before different judges. It is the reasoning of this particular verdict, running to 287 pages, that merits close analysis.The Gupta acquittal is one strand of a judgment in CBI v. Manoj Kumar Jayaswal & Ors. that acquits all five accused who stood trial: former Rajya Sabha MP Vijay Darda, his son Devendra Darda, businessman Manoj Kumar Jayaswal, AMR Iron and Steel Pvt Ltd, and Gupta. Two other accused, former minister of state for coal Santosh Bagrodia and section officer L.S. Janoti, had been discharged in 2019 before charges were framed.The judgment is worth attention for three doctrinal contributions that extend beyond the facts of this case: its treatment of a repealed anti-corruption provision, its reasoning on the evidentiary value of unsigned documents and its analysis of what constitutes a “valuable thing” under the Prevention of Corruption Act.A repealed provision and a higher bar for convictionThe most consequential doctrinal question concerns section 13(1)(d)(iii) of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, under which Gupta was charged. This provision criminalised a public servant who, while holding office, obtained for any person any valuable thing or pecuniary advantage “without any public interest”. It was repealed by the PC (Amendment) Act, 2018. No corresponding provision was introduced in the amended statute.Judge Sharma engaged directly with the implications of this repeal for pending prosecutions. Drawing on the Delhi high court’s decision in Runu Ghosh v. CBI (2011) and the special court’s own observations in Madhu Koda v. State (2020), the judgment holds that the 2018 amendment reflected a “legislative intent to exclude any such act, which was construed as criminal misconduct only for the reason that the conduct was against public interest”. The court reasoned that in pending cases under this repealed provision, “a higher degree of proof is required for seeking conviction” because “the purpose is to punish for corruption not for erroneous administrative decision taken in good faith”.This reasoning has implications for every pending coal block prosecution where public servants face charges under the old section 13(1)(d)(iii). The court is effectively holding that the repeal of the provision, while it does not extinguish pending cases, raises the evidentiary bar for conviction. An administrative decision that might once have been prosecuted as “without public interest” now requires clear evidence of corruption, as distinct from mere policy error. Whether other courts adopt this interpretive framework remains to be seen, but defence counsel in remaining coal cases will undoubtedly invoke it.An unsigned letter and its internal contradictionsThe judgment’s second contribution concerns the evidentiary treatment of unsigned documents. The CBI’s theory that Rs 24.60 crore was paid to Vijay Darda as illegal gratification rested, in part, on an unsigned typed letter dated August 21, 2009, purportedly written by Basant Lal Shaw, Jayaswal’s father, to Darda.The court held that this document “remained unproved as per the law”. Shaw was never examined as a witness. The letter bore no signature. Its contents, therefore, could not be read for the determination of the case.But the court went further, examining the letter’s internal consistency, even assuming its authenticity, and found it riddled with factual errors. The court concluded that “no reliance can be placed on the same” given these “apparent factual discrepancies”.The treatment illustrates a principle that investigating agencies sometimes overlook: a document that is both legally unproved and internally inconsistent has no probative value, however central it may be to the prosecution’s narrative.The third doctrinal strand concerns what constitutes a “valuable thing” or “pecuniary advantage” under Section 13(1)(d) of the PC Act. The CBI’s case treated the Screening Committee’s recommendation as the point at which a corrupt benefit was conferred. The court disagreed, relying on the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Manohar Lal Sharma v. Principal Secretary (2014).It is the allocation letter, the court held, that creates a valuable right, specifically the right to apply for a mining lease. A mere recommendation by the Screening Committee, which the minister of coal was free to reject, conferred no bankable entitlement.This distinction mattered because Gupta had retired on November 30, 2008, days before the option letter (December 23, 2008) and months before the final allocation letter (May 29, 2009) were issued. Even if the recommendation was treated as improper, the “valuable thing” came into existence only after Gupta had ceased to hold office. The statutory requirement of Section 13(1)(d), that the public servant obtain the benefit “while holding office”, was thus unsatisfied on the facts.What the evidence did and did not showBeyond these doctrinal contributions, the judgment is notable for what it reveals about the quality of investigation in this particular case. The CBI’s conspiracy charge rested on the assumption that AMR, Darda and Gupta had a prior understanding. The court found “absolute lack of evidence to show any nexus or communication verbal or written” between AMR or Jayaswal on one side and Gupta or Darda on the other.On the misrepresentation charge, the court found that the application form’s own drafting was so imprecise, with undefined terms like “group companies” and “associate companies”, that a response to its queries could not ground criminal liability.The court also noted a mathematical problem the CBI had never addressed: AMR’s entire net worth was approximately Rs 2 crore, making the 26% equity share (which a family settlement allocated to the person “instrumental” in securing a coal block) worth roughly Rs 50 lakh. The alleged payment of Rs 24.6 crore was 50 times that figure. The court found the CBI’s inference of illegal gratification “wholly unfounded and untenable”.On the alleged role of Vijay Darda, the court was categorical. Darda had written letters to the Prime Minister’s Office recommending allocation of the Bander coal block to AMR. The CBI treated this as the fulcrum of the conspiracy. The court found that the letters were “of no consequence in securing allocation” because they were neither placed before the Screening Committee nor considered by any of its members.The recommendation ran contrary to what Darda had sought: he had asked for exclusive allocation; the committee recommended a joint allocation with two other companies, for a fraction of the capacity.The court held that no criminality could be attributed to Darda for “merely routinely addressing the said letters to the Prime Minister’s Office in his capacity as a Member of Parliament for the development of his constituency”.The Bander case was the first chargesheet filed in the coal block investigations. It was registered on March 27, 2014, exactly 12 years before the acquittal. Of the 27 coal cases disposed of across two special courts, the outcomes have been mixed: at least 19 convictions have been secured, but a number of cases, particularly those involving public servants, have ended in acquittals or discharges. Over 25 CBI cases remain pending, along with 45 complaints under the PMLA.Each of these arose from the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Manohar Lal Sharma v. Principal Secretary, which cancelled 214 coal block allocations and directed criminal investigation. That decision identified a genuine systemic failure: the allocation process between 1993 and 2010 was discretionary, opaque and constitutionally deficient.The Bander verdict does not disturb the convictions obtained in other coal cases, nor does it suggest that the entire coal allocation controversy was manufactured. What it does is draw a sharp line between systemic policy failure and individual criminal liability.The Screening Committee operated under guidelines issued by the Energy Coordination Committee and the PMO. Its decisions were collective and unanimous, signed by all members, including representatives of the state government and the Ministry of Steel. In this institutional landscape, the CBI attempted to locate individual criminality in the actions of a chairman who presided over a consensus decision, an MP whose letters were never read by the decision-makers, and a company that received a fraction of what it sought.The court found, after 287 pages of analysis, that the prosecution’s case amounted to “conjunctures and surmises”.For the remaining coal prosecutions involving public servants, particularly those charged under the now-repealed section 13(1)(d)(iii), that finding, and the doctrinal framework built around it, carries significant weight.